


mens mentis

by evanlinge



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen, Implied Incest, Implied Slash, Multi, S04E19: Pictures Of You
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-28
Updated: 2013-06-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 11:54:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/861711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evanlinge/pseuds/evanlinge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Sometimes," Damon says, “my brother falls under the mistaken impression that I don't love him.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	mens mentis

 

This is not what Damon Salvatore wants. He doesn't want Elena Gilbert, not in the way Stefan thinks he does– he doesn't want her _love_. He's tasted love, once, twice, and each time it burned hotter than the sun, more bitter than vervain.

 

He could leave– walk away from this town and it's continuous cycle of death, rebirth and madness. But, Damon muses that this version of himself is less likely to abandon his companions. Perhaps ' _accomplices_ ' may be a more appropriate word. Stefan would like that. Stefan of course, thinks it's Elena, his feelings, and the tangled mess of the sire bond that keeps Damon in Mystic Falls. It's not, at least not in the way Stefan believes. Sire bonds, he knows well, nearly always end in ruin. Given enough time, just about everything will fall apart.

 

The trick, Damon thinks, is piecing it back together, like a child's jigsaw puzzle; and if it pleases Stefan to imagine that he and Elena can piece Damon's psyche back together, Damon is more than happy to let him. What Stefan doesn't understand, is that Damon doesn't want Elena because she is naive, beautiful, or human( _was human_ ). It wasn't her resemblance to Katherine that drew him to her, and it wasn't her unfaltering attempts to find a side of him that vampirism hasn't swallowed whole.

 

* * *

 

This _obsession_ , that his accomplices call his weakness, his Achilles' heel, is not love. When Damon loves, he loves wildly, passionately, with a devotion which tears at his mind with it's intensity. Even as a human, and oh how long ago that was, Damon always walked the razor fine line between ardent love and impassioned fury. His and Stefan's poisonous love affair with Katherine was proof of that much.

 

This _thing_ , that Damon feels for Elena, isn't love. It's hunger. It's a craving, a need for something stronger than blood. An addiction to the sharp twist of Stefan's mouth when Damon's eyes turn to Elena. The finely suppressed tremor in Stefan's hands when Damon wipes Elena's blood from his mouth– and oh how Damon _wants_ ; wants blood, wants sex, wants Elena, and wants to devour the way Stefan rages and controls himself. Controls himself from lashing out against Damon and allowing himself to be dragged into the whirlpool of his older brother's own decadent _want_.

 

* * *

 

_“I don’t want you to see this side of me,” Stefan says, once._

 

_“Don’t be foolish Stefan. I created this side of you.”_

 

* * *

 

There is something in the way that Stefan attempts, and occasionally fails, to repress himself; his feelings, his wants, his cravings, his very _nature_ , that makes Damon itch to open up Elena's heart and force Stefan to drink until he drains her dry of all her sweet, sweet, humanity.

 

Where this instinct came from, Damon isn't certain, but Stefan's guilty reflex is unmistakable. " _It may,_ " he says on one occasion, when Stefan rages at him for the dead boy slumped across the sofa, pale with blood loss, " _simply be a_ _by-product_ _of the unfortunate circumstances of my vampiric rebirth_." When Stefan's scathing words melt into self-loathing anger, Damon never mentions it aloud again.

 

* * *

 

Early on, Elena asks.

 

“Sometimes,” Damon replies, glancing over Stefan's still form to Elena, “my brother falls under the mistaken impression that I don't love him.”

 

“I take it that killing all his girlfriends over the years was out of love?” she snarls, all righteous spit-fire rage. It's inspiring, and really, sort of a waste.

 

“The sweetest kind,” Damon agrees, amicably.

 

* * *

 

When Damon orders Elena to shut off her humanity, he feels it like a subtle quiver in the back of his mind– Stefan's alarm and his own, more subdued reaction to the muted sire bond. Something in him, a malicious ire reminiscent of the weeks after his vampiric awakening, wants to slice open the shreds of the sire bond and watch Elena lose herself in the resulting aftershocks of his buried insanity. The ensuing delirium, he knows, would kill such a young vampire.

 

" _Damon-_ " Stefan breathes, and Damon hands her the matches instead.

 

* * *

 

Stefan talks about the Cure, about _fixing_ Elena and regaining his own humanity. Damon reads Lexi's indoctrination in his words and recalls how Stefan had pressed too close to him, whispering softly against Damon's throat, after killing Andie. Damon wonders what they could become, the two Salvatore brothers together, without Stefan's damned _control_.

 

* * *

 

The creature before him walks like Stefan, talks like Stefan, but is wrong. Damon knows his brother's every temperament better than his own, and this illusion is not he. He wrenches the strands of his psyche around him, layers of shadows and shades of false ideas and fallacious memories.

 

 _"Your mind,"_ Silas says, terribly softly, _"is a very dark and riveting place, Damon."_

 

Damon doesn't care what Silas sees in his mind, full of ambiguous rage and recondite pleasure. He barely feels the tear of the stake at his midsection, and doesn't hear the words that spill unbidden from his mouth. Elena, he knows, isn't what he wants. It doesn't matter what Silas sees, only that it is anything but the truth.

 

* * *

 

 _"How did he get to you?"_ Stefan asks.

 

 _"Talked about your hair. I thought it had to be you,"_ Damon offers glibly, and doesn't look back at Elena's still form in the cellar. It's not Elena, that Damon wants.

 

 


End file.
